


And It Burns

by escritoireazul



Category: The Cave (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, body transformation, slight body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28142781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/pseuds/escritoireazul
Summary: Charlie knows, with an inescapable certainty all the way down to her bones, that it iswrongto take the jaegers deep. Caving is about your body and the cave, strength and stone and darkness, and not some goddamn machine.
Relationships: Charlie/Jack McAllister
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	And It Burns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UrbanAmazon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/gifts).



Charlie knows, with an inescapable certainty all the way down to her bones, that it is _wrong_ to take the jaegers deep.

Caving is about your body and the cave, strength and stone and darkness. Diving is the same, just with water added, leagues and leagues of it and the weight it carries, the pressure.

The jaegers aren’t anything like that. Their power doesn’t come from the strength of the body, not really, not only. You need bravery for that, and intelligence, and determination, and sheer grit.

But the jaegers aren’t that, they are those things and more, and she doesn’t like the _and more_ that comes with them.

You can’t feel the cave through them. Can’t breathe the air, wet or musty or thick with shit and moss and mold or whatever else it carries. Can’t feel the stone. Can’t feel the water. Can’t taste the metal bite of air from the oxygen tank.

She tries to explain this, when they come to the team looking for experienced cavers and divers who might also be able to drift, but no one really gets it. Or maybe they’re just too excited to care. In the jaegers, they can go deeper. Deeper under the stone and deeper into the water and deeper into the heart of the earth.

It’s not right, Charlie says, but they don’t understand. They don’t listen. None of them listen.

None of them but Jack and, of course, whether he believes her or not -- he does, she thinks half the time, and he doesn’t the rest -- he’s going down. It calls him, the depth and the darkness. It calls him, and it calls her too, and she’s not letting him, not letting the team, go down without her.

It’s a sick thing, when she and Jack are the only ones who can drift, and, for all that, can drift _together_. A terrible thing. A wonderful thing.

He’s inside her now, inside her head, inside her body, in all the places she can share with someone else, and all the places she can’t, and all the places she wouldn’t even if she could. He’s inside her, and she’s inside him, and it’s the best thing she’s ever known, and the worst.

It happens like this: they go to the combat room. All of them try each other. They’re a team, and they dive together, and climb together, and laugh together, and cry together, and live together, and would die together, so it makes sense that maybe they could drift together, too.

Except none of them feel right. They fight, but it’s not a conversation. They fight, but they don’t hear each other. They fight, but it’s awkward, too hard or too soft or just _too_ anything.

And then Jack steps onto the mat with her and before they even start to move, Charlie swears she can hear him like a hum just at the far edge of audible.

He’s cautious, each move precise. She is not. She throws herself at him, strike and strike and strike, and every time he blocks. She spins high, he blocks and moves low. She jumps and he twists. She ducks and arches.

Strike and block and block and strike.

When they’re done, she’s shaking, adrenaline and exhaustion and satisfaction, and he is, too.

Dr. Jennings smiles at them, a slight curve of her lips. It would be smug on someone else, but Charlie’s not sure Doc would ever be that.

“We’ll try you in the cradle next,” Doc says, but it’s clear she thinks it’s a formality.

Charlie thinks that, too.

Taking a jaeger down is wrong, still. She can’t be the only one who sees it.

But Jack’s going down in that great big machine, and she’s going down with him.

It’s an easy drop to first base camp. The approach has been drilled for them already. It’s practically a slide, and Charlie hates it. She’d hate it inside the jaeger, too, but she hates it enough like this. There’s no challenge to it.

They rest there for a couple days. Doc takes readings. This is a new thing they’re testing, ways to predict where the kaiju will come, along with tests elsewhere to figure out how soon and how many. 

While they wait, Charlie and Jack run through their paces in their jaeger. It’s smaller than the ones topside and the ones that go into the ocean, easier to maneuver, and faster too. Underground is a different place to fight, but that’s where the kaiju are coming now, evolved for darkness and tight spaces, and they have to evolve too.

Pilots sit one in front of the other. Big spoon and little spoon, Tyler jokes, mostly because Jack sits in the front seat, Charlie tight against his back, and there’s no world in which Tyler doesn’t find that funny.

Even through their suits, Jack is warm. Charlie likes how he feels in front of her, solid and strong. And he trusts her at his back. Figuratively and literally before and completely now, outside and in.

There’s a lot going on, but even with all that, Charlie’s bored waiting. She and Jack and Top climb. That always feels good, and even better now that she’s done so much inside the jaeger. She needs the air, and she needs the feel of the rock against her bare fingers, and she needs the burn of her muscles more than that indescribable space inside where the drift burns.

It attacks while she’s near the top of their climb, and Jack is halfway up, and Top’s at the bottom, which would make her laugh if Jack wasn’t bleeding, the back of his shoulder clawed open. Charlie releases the lock and slides down her rope too fast to get to him. Top’s shouting, and she can hear Briggs in the background, sounding very far away, and Doc behind him, and Tyler too.

The kaiju is off Jack and gone into the darkness before she gets to him. 

“I’m good,” he says, breathing hard. “We’ve got to drift.”

Her back burns with the feel of the cuts, claws deep into his skin, hers the echo. He needs help, that wound covered, antibiotics, but he wants to fight, and so does she, or maybe that’s an echo too.

They drop together, too fast too fast too fast, and Top is shouting for a med kit and for them to stop and they’re running for Fathom Five and she can feel him, she can _feel_ him. They scramble into their pod, his chest against her back, and he’s bleeding on her but he can’t there’s a suit there’s a _suit_ , she’s bleeding no she’s not it burns and he burns and she burns with him and and and and and 

( _and_ )

“Neural handshake engaged.”

He snaps into her, and she into him, and they’re moving. They can see in the dark, and that’s one of the few ways the jaeger is better, and they scrape against the rocks as they run, and that’s better, too.

Jack’s heart pounds in her throat, and her breath expands his lungs, and she swings the right arm and he kicks left. They hit the edge of a cliff running, the kaiju a flicker ahead of them, and they fall into the darkness. They leap.

The water closes over them, and everyone’s shouting, and Doc is in their ear, and Jack is in her brain, and there’s blood, there’s so much blood, and

( _and Jack and Charlie and JackandCharlie and and and_ )

the ragged edges of Jack’s undershirt are in the wound, and Charlie’s pressed against it, and it hurts, it aches, it burns through her muscles and her veins and her bones.

Jack screams, or she screams, or they both do, and they hit the kaiju underwater, and she headbutts it to drive it back, and Jack punches into its chest, and there is so much blood, it fills the water around them, clouds of it, all she can see, and she can taste blood, Jack’s blood in her mouth, and it hurts and it burns and it feels too much and it almost feels good.

They tear the kaiju to pieces, Jack and Charlie, Charlie and Jack, his hand and her hand and their hands, and there’s blood on their hands on their bodies on the shell that is Fathom Five on her chest on his back on her fingers on her chin.

Top’s right there when they open the jaeger, and Doc next to him. Top fusses with Jack’s wound. Charlie gets him a mug of tea and herself one too. She takes hers black he likes sugar they’re both sweet she can taste it in his even if she can’t in hers they’re close still too close he’s hurt she’s there in his pain and and and

( _and and and Charlie and Jack and she breathes and she breathes_ )

She sits next to Jack, one of her arms pressed against his. Their suits are off and their undershirts pulled down to their waists, and she can feel him, skin to skin, and she can feel him, the pain at his back, the burn that runs through him, shoulder to ankle.

His head hangs forward, and he breathes. She breathes. They breathe through the pain.

Charlie doesn't decide to fuck him so much as she knows she wants it and she knows he wants it too, she can feel him already, his desire, his need, and its her desire and her need, too. There is no him and no her, not really, not now, not after that drift, not with the ghost of it running through their senses, not with whatever she swears she feels running through their veins.

She doesn't _decide_ to fuck him, but then Jack is there, and she wants him he needs her they're drowning in desire, and so she takes him and he lets himself be taken. Takes her in return.

He’s hard inside her, and hot, the thick thrust of him stretches her, and as wet as she is, it still burns. She rocks against him, drives her hips down and down and down, and his hands curl against her thighs, his nails cut tight into her skin, they’re sharp they’re sharp why are they so sharp there’s blood slick and hot between them and she’s slick and hot where he pushes inside her she can feel it from him the way he throbs the way she’s tight and wet around him and she needs more she needs more she needs more she needs him to touch her and his nails dig deep and then his thumb is on her pressing just right and she feels him thrust and throb and fill her and she fills him too she clenches down on him tight he squeezes her where she pushes inside and it burns it’s so good.

Jack’s eyes flash at her, his pupils slit. She can smell him, and the others, and the burn of kaiju blood that should have been washed away by now. She can feel his sweat, and her own, and he burns she burns.

Doc watches them. 

( _Jack watches her watch Charlie watch him watch them and the heat of it burns._ )

“They’ve never brought a parasite before.” Doc shows them things on her machines. Chemical breakdowns and microscopic images and things Charlie doesn’t understand. She’s no scientist. She never wanted to be. She’s a climber, and a diver, and a jaeger pilot, and two of those she wanted, and one of them she didn’t, but she’s all those things now.

Doc stares at them, and she looks curious, and she smells afraid.

Charlie’s all those things now, and something more, and Jack gave it to her.

“Category --” Dr. Nicolai cuts himself off. “Two. Ten. I don’t know, with these. Kaiju incoming.”

Jack’s inside her even before they’re in the jaeger, before the handshake, before she curls against his back, healed now, too quick, and he’s too pale and he pitches forward and his skin moves and it burns and it burns and it burns.

This kaiju spits acid and rocks melt and oh, it _burns_.

It tears at them, and spits at them, and the right arm goes, and Charlie screams and Jack screams and the kaiju screams and there’s blood there’s blood there’s so much blood.

Charlie drives them forward Jack lowers their head Charlie bites and tears but they have no mouth no teeth and there’s blood in her throat and Jack inside her hows and Charlie inside him snarls and the kaiju it screams.

Jack rips her from Fathom Five. It’s broken, she’s broken, they’re broken, and his mouth is on her, and his blood, and she can hear him inside her, feel him, and her skin twists and her bones twist and her throat twists and oh god oh god oh god it’s inside her, the kaiju inside her, Jack inside her

( _she burns_ )

and she can see, for a moment, the world beyond this world, the world where the kaijus are created and changed and sent to attack.

Jack’s there with her, hands on her, mouth on her, and together they breathe and they breathe and they breathe and they burn.

Jack’s eyelids flicker when he blinks, like a lizard, and Charlie’s does the same. 

They go back to the surface for repairs to Fathom Five and tests for Charlie and Jack and to a world that smells of too much and is far too bright and tastes strange on their tongues. Doc keeps them inside the Dome, or that’s what she tries and that’s what they’re ordered, but the air is stale and there are too many people.

The roof is unlocked. It’s cold outside. Their breath steams.

Jack grabs her hand. His nails are sharp. His eyes shine in the darkness. He moves like an animal now, shoulders moving in strange, inhuman ways. She paces him as he walks the perimeter.

He doesn’t ask, but still she says yes, yes, yes, and then he says _please_.

Charlie misses Fathom Five, and she never expected it to be so, but they don’t need it any longer, not when she’s strong, and Jack, and their bodies are better weapons than any machine, and they tear kaiju apart, in the caves in the dark, and she can feel Jack always, ghost drift and more, and through everything through it all through blood and pain and transformation

( _through Charlie and Jack and charlieandjack_ )

through what she knows and what he doesn’t

and always they _burn_.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, credit and many thanks to my beloved beta, C.


End file.
